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Clinicians Ought to View Anger Contextually

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 October 2014

Raymond W. Novaco*
Affiliation:
University of California, Irvine
*
School of Social Ecology, Psychology and Social Behavior, University of California, Irvine, California, 92717-5150
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Abstract

Constructions of the experiential sources of anger, both in ordinary language accounts and in scientific studies, are characterised by a proximity bias. Anger is commonly represented as being due to acute, proximate occurrences. However, anger can be alternatively understood to be a product of contextual conditions, which may involve distal or ambient determinants. The themes of embeddedness, interrelatedness, and transformationality, derived from the contextual perspective of Stokols in environmental psychology, are presented for the understanding of anger as pertinent to clinical concerns and as heuristics for anger management interventions.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 1993

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References

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